The subject proteolytic fungal enzyme food supplement composition was invented to meet the needs of strength athletes. These athletes were, and still are, relying upon various protein-containing foods and protein-containing food supplements in order to provide an ample supply of amino acid building blocks necessary for human muscle protein synthesis.
Many of the popular food supplements commercially available today do not contain whole food proteins, instead they contain enzymatic protein hydrolysates and/or amino acids in their free form. These food supplements, which the compositions of the present invention are intended to replace, are not only expensive, but they are usually unpalatable.
The seminal concept of the present inventive compositions is to utilize the human stomach and small intestine of the human athlete as a reaction vessel in which an ingested dietary protein will be converted into amino acids in advance of, and adjunctive to, the normal endogenous enzyme systems.
Although other digestive enzyme preparations are presently commercially available, these enzyme preparations have several limitations when used for this purpose. For example, most proteolytic preparations currently marketed use either the fruit proteases papain and/or bromelain, or the animal-derived proteases pepsin and/or pancreatin. Of these, three of the enzymes--papain, bromelain and pepsin--are useless in the neutral to alkaline environment of the small intestine, and the fourth enzyme, pancreatin, has no activity in the human stomach. In fact, pancreatin enzymes are frequently enteric-coated to prevent their hydrolytic decomposition by gastric juices. Finally, these is reticence among vegetarians and other health devotees, many of whom are also body culturists, to use animal-derived products, including the enzymes pepsin and pancreatin.
The proteolytic fungal enzyme food supplement composition of the present invention was designed for use as a tablet, capsule, powder or liquid food supplement, to be taken with protein-containing foods in order to convert ingested dietary proteins into free amino acids, which then can be used by the body for muscle protein synthesis during anabolic cycles.
The present compositions are of value to muscle builders, weight lifters, and strength athletes, as well as to those on weight-gain programs.
To the best of the inventors' knowledge, only the presently claimed proteolytic fungal enzyme food supplement composition provides a combination of highly pH- and temperature-stable proteases that are active in the pH range of the entire digestive tract, which ranges from an acidic pH of 2 in the stomach to a semi-alkaline pH of 8 in the small intestine. In addition, the present fungal protease enzymes were chosen not only for their stability and activity, but also because they rapidly produce amino acids in free form, in contrast to the enzymes papain, bromelain and pepsin which produce short chain peptides from protein substrates. This was confirmed by tests which showed that the presently claimed proteolytic enzyme food supplement composition produced over 40 percent more amino acids in free form than the enzymes pepsin and pancreatin in comparative tests conducted in a gastrointestinal simulator.
The major advantage of the present invention is that the unique combination of proteolytic fungal enzymes is able to effectively convert, in the gastrointestinal system of a human being, ingested dietary protein into free amino acids and short chain peptides, such that the proteolytic enzymatic activity continually occurs throughout the gastrointestinal pH spectrum associated with a human digestive system, thereby making readily available to the human system an enhanced amount of amino acids in the free form.
These and additional objects and advantages of the present invention are shown from the description below.